From A (Anarctica) to Z (Zanzibar)

How do these things happen? I don’t really know, and also, I kind of do. A long unwinding of threads, with some, “Really? But how did I get so lucky?” helps explain it, but a lot of it feels like magic. As though things I didn’t know I wanted walked right up to me and said, “Hey, would you like to have a adventure you never imagined?” The answer is always — should always — I hope, will always be “Yes. Yes I would.” In a few days, I am leaving for East Africa.

About a year ago, I received an invitation to travel to Turkey. I could not go and I was sad about this, partly because I have long wanted to go to Turkey and partly because a good friend would have been on the trip as well. I was also delighted because how often does a person get invited to Turkey? Not very often, I think. I am continually amazed when anyone invites me anywhere just because they’d like me to write about it. I know that there is business, but there are any number of writers with better markets and more sizable audiences (though no audience could be as smart and good looking and interesting and evolved as you are, of course). There are writers who are easier than I am with their words, and who don’t always peek at the man behind the curtain. I am surprised to be invited anywhere as my attraction for the odd, sad, or quirky is not what typically makes for good marketing. Yet I do get these invites, and I think the same two things always. The first is “Why?” and the second is “Wow, really? Thank you!”

I had forgotten about this invitation to Turkey until I received another invitation from the same company, Intrepid Travel. I’d forgotten in the way that one forgets about gifts that were never received or clothing left un-purchased from fancy shops because really, when would you wear that dress and shouldn’t you save the money for plane tickets? The new invitation said something like, “Hey, remember how we invited you to Turkey and you couldn’t go? We’d like to try again to send you somewhere, here are, like, ten amazing trips, and you should pick one and we’ll send you.”And I thought, “Really?” and also, again, “I am the luckiest person in the whole world, honestly.”

The list had things on it like traveling from Damascus to Cairo and Beijing to St. Petersburg via Mongolia and crossing the Australian Outback. I am not allowed to cross the Australian Outback without the husband as not only did we meet there, but his affection for that part of the planet might excel his affection for me, and should I go without him, oh, there would be hell to pay. And while I would love to go from Damascus to Cairo, they do insist on continuing to have revolution there, so it turned out I would only be going to Jordan. As much I wanted to go to Jordan, if you read the travel blogs much, you are perhaps suffering from Jordan fatigue, which is tragic but also true. This sentiment was  echoed in the words of an editor I spoke with recently who said, in not so many words, “If I read another blog post about the wonders of Petra, I am going to shoot myself.”

I like this editor very much, it made no sense to sacrifice this fine human to my desire to skip around inside the mysterious and beautiful architecture of the Nabateans. While I genuinely believed I could write well of Jordan, I did not think it fair to pile yet another breathlessly worded description of the temples — are they temples or palaces — on to the heap, not right now. I declined the trip to Jordan, as much as it pained me, and asked if I could go to Tanzania instead. “How’s about Beijing? Can you be there on the 15th of August, ready to go?” As I was sitting in Austria at the time of this exchange and had plans to be at a writer’s conference in Marin County on the 14th, I could not imagine getting immunized, visa-ed, packed, and ready to go for an epic overland adventure through Western China by August 15th. I again declined with great regret, not only because Western China seems like the kind of place I might actually lose my mind to the landscape in the same way I lost it in Montana, by being overwhelmed with open space and wind and sky.

This is all perfectly ridiculous, of course. I could not go to Australia because it would be like infidelity and I could not go to Jordan because the words were all used up and I could not go to China because, well, that makes some sense because I just physically couldn’t be ready in time. And so, through a series of somewhat absurd negotiations, we settled, the Intrepid Travel rep and I, on a trip that will take me overland from Nairobi, Kenya, to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with a stopover on the island of Zanzibar. “Zanzibar!” I wrote to my PR contact. “Zanzibar has two ‘Z’s in it! How exciting is that?!?” She seemed to think that was as good a reason as any for me to be the right person to go to Zanzibar, because of my enthusiasm for the double Z.

I am at the checklist phase of preparing for my trip. I am printing the required documentation and acquiring the last missing things for my packing — sunscreen and batteries and a data roaming package for my phone. I have washed my rain shell in fresh waterproofing, just in case, and today at the market we got a lot of those fruit and nut bars I like to have for long flights. I am nervous and excited and a little bit queasy and anxious about the 20 hours of flying coach. I am sleeping restlessly as I worry about sharing a tent with a stranger and about what it will be like to walk out in to the arrivals hall in Nairobi. Then I have to pause for a while and think, “Nairobi! The arrivals hall in Nairobi! What kind of person gets sent to Nairobi!” I think about how six months ago, shortly after returning from Antarctica, I wrote about how I would like to see elephants in the wild and now, I am leaving to see elephants in the wild. After that I have to stare into the middle ground for a little while and then, go lie down because the wonder of it all is really too much to bear.

How does this happen? I know how it happens, I do, but it still seems unspeakably magic that I should wake up one morning and find that I am bound for Antarctica or Tanzania merely because I like go places and write down what I have seen there. I am to see elephants in the wild, and there will be no fences and the smell of grass and the noise of things that move around in the bush at night. I will rattle around in a dusty land rover with a dozen or more tourists in khaki clothing and we will look ridiculous. I will wish had binoculars instead of my telephoto lens and the grass will scratch at my ankles and at some moment I will push a cup of tea away and think, “How did this happen to me? Truly, I am the luckiest person alive.”